April 2, 2003

War memorials

Two current dance performances confront troubled times.

By Rita Felciano

'MAKE ART THAT matters," performing arts presenter Ken Foster implored local dancers and choreographers at last week's Dance/USA-sponsored town meeting. Now more than ever, Foster said, we need artists to help us survive (and shed light on) what is happening in the world. Art that addresses larger human concerns resonates in a way that, maybe, religion did during previous eras – however temporarily, it can create a sense of community, a zone of sanity.

As if answering Foster's call, two choreographers who otherwise couldn't be more different from each other recently presented works that confront the human cost of acts of aggression. Both pieces deal with fiery destruction that rains from above. Shinichi Momo Koga's intermittently absorbing solo Tasting an Ocean (March 21, Theatre of Yugen) combined an interpretation of his father surviving the atomic bomb in Nagasaki with Koga's own memories of playing at the beaches in Japan. The chaos and sense of disintegration in Paul Taylor's Promethean Fire (March 26, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater) may or may not have been inspired by the attacks on the World Trade Center, but regardless, its images of piled-up bodies fusing into a war memorial had a shuddering impact.

According to Koga's program notes, his father was five years old when a flash of atomic light touched him: "Frightened, he ran into the steaming ocean. Scalded, he ran out." Tasting an Ocean consisted of a series of vignettes. Its elaborate score collaged train and siren sounds and music ranging from American folk and Japanese pop to John Zorn and Dmitry Shostakovich.

At times Koga seemed to externalize dream states – dives to the floor as rockets screamed overhead felt like nightmares – but he also depicted physical struggles. Contorting feet revealed life in what otherwise looked like a curled-up corpse. Catching and squashing cicadas became an act of obsession. A passage in which Koga built a float and hung onto it lost punch because of excessive length. The most telling episodes were those in which the Butoh-trained dancer evoked an underwater state: sluggish sinking to the ground, the vacant stare of a floating body, upward glances, and a gaping mouth from which breath exited and entered. In those slow-motion sequences, Koga effectively created a sense of life suspended, waiting for something to happen.

With Promethean Fire, master choreographer Taylor created art that matters – not because the stacks of bodies and the panicky people looked like TV footage, but because Taylor transformed these likenesses into images of classic grandeur. Running crowds, their faces uplifted as if waiting for something else to fall, coalesced into chains that rushed across the stage as part of a huge, formal dance of death. People fell in groups, only to pop up again; men clasped women to their chests with a force that made them stagger. The frenzied activity repeatedly froze into poses reminiscent of the war memorials that dot South American villages.

Prometheus was punished by the gods because he stole fire to give to humans, signifying the onset of civilization; for Taylor, ever the supreme ironist, the fire from heaven destroys civilization. Central to Fire was a mound of bodies that kept growing as dancers dropped on top of each other. Out of this writhing destruction rose not a new Adam and Eve but a couple – Michael Trusnovec and Lisa Viola – whose budding relationship deteriorated into fist fights until Viola, in an act of desperation, hurled herself rocketlike across the stage into Trusnovec's welcoming arms.

In addition to the rather silly A Field of Grass, 1995's Offenbach Overtures was also on the opening-night program. Superbly performed, particularly by Viola as the gauche outsider, this look at 19th-century French café society and Folies Bergères culture was frothy on the surface, yet beneath was a jaundiced look at relationships between men and women. The dancers may have resembled cancan girls and toy soldiers, but their balletic maneuvers were marked by grotesque distortions. The mock duel between Richard Chen See and Patrick Corbin, in which two reluctant combatants were egged on by boorish accomplices (Trusnovec and Robert Kleinendorst), struck a particularly timely note.